Letter to the Editor: A Quieter Leaf Blower and Community

There’s something I’d love to give thanks for next year at this time – a world, or at least a town, without leaf blowers. I actually forbid our landscaper a few years ago from using one after a spring when one of his workers blew down hundreds of our daffodils. Now he uses a rake on the lawn and a broom on the driveway; and the leaves that fall on the garden stay there to turn into mulch. He doesn’t complain, actually, and he didn’t raise his rates.

I am surprised that by now the technology has not appeared to make all these machines battery powered. That should eliminate some of the noise. Some of us put a lot of time and effort into our landscaping and property appearance. I am not in favor of this choice being controlled by another by -law !

Yesterday morning, in the pouring rain the day before Thanksgiving, we watched a yard crew blowing a neighbor’s lawn. Adding to this absurdity was the fact the yard’s trees were still full of leaves. I can understand a one-time fall cleanup of downed leaves, but the weekly “touch ups” of blowing is, frankly, obsessive, ridiculous and wasteful.

Me. I do not blow the leaves, I mulch them with the lawn mower at the same time doing a final season’s grass cut.. The mulched leaves form a gentle fertilizer effective as the new grass sprouts in the early spring. What a delight, I do not bag anything, I do not buy any bags, I do not fertilize the grass, and I do not need a leaf blower either. Why can’t everybody be like me?

Because some of us have enough leaves falling from our surrounding trees that your MO is not an option. If we try to mulch them either the lawnmower, there will still be way too much mulched leaves on the grass and would in effect kill our lawns. So leaf blowing/taking and bagging is the only option some of us have.
Happy thanksgiving neighbor.